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Sunday, 24 January 2016

Trump: The Most Successful Pundit in America – But The Worst Presidential Candidate

by William Dry

656,000 British citizens have signed a petition calling for
Donald Trump to be banned from entering the UK on grounds of hate speech. It
would be lazy for me to write an article detailing the horror show of Trump’s
candidacy. The jokes would write themselves. He’s a character you might see in
Veep or The Thick of It; a fool who’s blissfully unaware of his own flaws, in
this case – narcissism, arrogance, and being darn right mean. However, this
particular character has escaped the microcosm of Veep, and, trapped with the
mentality his creator designated him, has decided to run for President.

However, I have decided to resist the temptation that Trump
offers us all: to set off a firework which lights up the sky with “Will’s a
moral human being! J”
You may think Trump is a fool, but the facts are he has been very successful in
business (which is obviously not the be all and end all, but he clearly isn’t
as stupid as some people think), and he has humiliated the political pundits
since his entry into the race. The pillars of Trump’s campaign were derided by
the media – the media labelled each announcement as the end of his campaign.
However, with each announcement his polls went up, and up, and up. He has won
every debate according to the polls, and has dominated not just the Republican
invisible primary, but even featured in Obama’s State of the Union address. For
all his bluster, lack of variation of adjectives, and crass, in electoral
terms, he has been the most successful politician in the last 6 months in the
world. To dismiss him as an ‘idiot’ is lazy, and is to misunderstand how badly
the media, and the Washington class currently understand US politics. His
policies may be scary, but equally scary is the lack of acknowledgement for
both how many people he represents, and his successful political techniques.

He started his
campaign with an announcement that set the agenda for the next month: the
jaw-dropper was his approach to the 11 million undocumented immigrants. Donald
wants them all out – men, women, children. He wants to build a ‘big wall’, with
a ‘big beautiful door’ so that he can let the useful ones back in. Trump said
that the illegal immigrants “were bringing drugs” – 90% of cocaine that is in
the US transits through Mexico. He said that they were “bringing crime” –
illegal immigrants in Califorina, Texas, Arizona, Florida, and New York make up
just 5.6% of the population, but account for 38% of all murder convictions. He
even said that some were “rapists” – in Texas, more than 2000 illegal
immigrants were deported after committing sex-related offenses. Needless to
say, there are a whole set of facts which support the other side of the debate,
and I am not going to come down on either side. Trump, while he may not been
the first to raise the issue in contemporary politics, his daring rhetoric
undoubtedly placed the issue at the heart of the start of the invisible
Republican primary. It bought him political capita: people thought he was
straight talking, and bold – exactly what a core of the Republican base think
the country needs.

The immigration policy is well.. a bit harder to defend.
Just saying “We have a problem” (which every Western country does), does not
justify blocking all Muslims from entering the country. It would lead to the
bizarre situation that Sadiq Khan, the favourite for the next Mayor of London,
being unable to visit the Mayor of New York to discuss the challenges of
running a major city. The idea is especially perverse considering America’s
history on religious freedoms, an idea even more central to the twenty-first century Republican party.

However, perhaps this is the genius of Trump: even
while the idea is clearly wacky, morally repugnant, and quite simply bad, it
worked. The media lapped it up. There wasn’t a person in America who didn’t
hear the whir of “Trump this..” “Trump that..” from their television (probably
made in South Korea – damn those stupid trade deals from the stupid leaders) in
the following days. A simple voter could be forgiven for forgetting that there
were other candidates in the Republican primary, or even Presidential race,
given this onslaught of attention. His poll ratings jumped up 10 points in the
space of a week, a percentage that eludes most candidates who, despite name
recognition and experience on the political scene, have collectively mustered
the force of a paper fan a middle schooler might make, in contrast to Hurricane
Donald.

On economics, Trump has an aggressive, protectionist stance.
He is sick and tired of seeing his country’s politicians being outwitted by the
crafty Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. There is a disturbance in the logical
universe when he bemoans how China have taken all their jobs – it is American
demand for cheaper Chinese goods that is partially responsible for production
shifting abroad. A Ball State study claims that 90% of the job losses in
manufacturing are the result of productivity gains – “Had we kept 2000-levels
of productivity and applied them to 2010-levels of production, we would have
required 20.9 million manufacturing workers. Instead, we employed only 12.1
million.” In short, the policy is misguided.
Trump’s tariff would need Congressional support – which it wouldn’t get,
and, as the policy is inconsistent with the WTO, China would win the right to
retaliate via their own tariffs.

However, while the policy may be drastically
flawed, the political insight behind it isn’t. The average American can quite
easily perceive China’s ruthless negotiators to outwit the well-intentioned
American on the other side of the table. They believe this because they hear
the stats about jobs, the growth of China. Worst of all, like a schoolyard
bully whose victim has a growth spurt over a summer holiday, their dominance as
the largest economic power is under threat. The appeal of Trump lies in his own
delusional expectations; that he can ‘kick ISIS’ ass, build a wall, and deport
11 million people’ – policies that are as flawed as they are possible. The
modern President cannot steamroll a deeply divided Congress that has developed
an allergy to bipartisanship. Nor can he, or she, void the Constitution – or
change how the Supreme Court interprets it. Trump has set the bar too high to
be successful; for all his self-professed personality he could not unite a
country he divided in the first place to become President. Despite all of
Trump’s success as a candidate, he cannot be a successful politician.